Visualizing a block allocator

GHC’s block allocator is a pretty nifty piece of low-level infrastructure. It offers a much more flexible way of managing a heap, rather than trying to jam it all in one contiguous block of memory, and is probably something that should be of general interest to anyone who is implementing low-level code like a runtime. The core idea behind it is quite old (BIBOP: Big Bag of Pages), and is useful for any situation where you have a number of objects that are tagged with the same descriptor, and you don’t want to pay the cost of the tag on each object.

Managing objects larger than pages is a bit tricky, however, and so I wrote a document visualizing the situation to help explain it to myself. I figured it might be of general interest, so you can get it here: http://web.mit.edu/~ezyang/Public/blocks.pdf

Some day I’ll convert it into wikiable form, but I don’t feel like Gimp'ing the images today...